One of the major biographical fictions in the Piltdown case incriminates
one of the minor characters. We first meet William Ruskin Butterfield, curator
of the Hastings Museum, in the pages of J. S. Weiner's The Piltdown Forgery
(where he receives the initials C. S.). Butterfield and Dawson, we
learn, got along well together. Dawson had shown the Piltdown fossils to
him, and Butterfield, recognizing their importance, had directed Dawson
to consult with British Museum authorities. Dawson gave Woodward a quick
image of Butterfield's intrepid explorations: Arthur Conan Doyle had spoken
of a rumor that iguanadon bones were in Crowborough. There weren't any such
bones, but, Dawson wrote, "Anyway, it brought the poor curator of the
Hastings Museum up to Crowborough on a bicycle at a moment's notice"
(May 13, 1911). Dawson mentions Butterfield again in June 1912, regarding
a collection to go to the Hastings Museum. And shortly after the announcement
to the Geological Society, Butterfield wrote to Woodward:

I am venturing to ask whether a plaster-cast of the skull and jaw discovered

in Sussex by Mr. Dawson could be made to the order of this Museum. The

discovery has interested me very much, and I am anxious to have here,
if

possible, a cast of the specimen. (December 20, 1912)

On August 9, 1913, Butterfield reported, "The clubs and axes carried
[in a pageant] by the Ancient Britons were made by Mr. Lewis Abbott, and
all who saw them will agree, 1 think, that they were remarkably well done."
He helped Abbott out financially. After Dawson's death, he arranged for
the Hastings Museum to buy Dawson's collection from his widow. He seems
a kindly sort. But, if we probe beneath the patina of [118] avuncular philanthropy,
we find, according to his accuser, a rock-hard and obsessively vengeful
personality.

It was Guy van Esbroeck's secondary Purpose in his Pleine Lumière
to clear Dawson and Teilhard of suspicion. His Primary Purpose was
to discover the hoaxer, an impossible task until the publication in 1965
of Teilhard's Lettres: "Fait Nouveau: Un incident in 1909 " heads
the chapter, sixth in van Esbroeck's book, describing the first of two critical
incidents leading to the identification of William Ruskin Butterfield as
Piltdown hoaxer.

On July 1, 1909, Teilhard wrote to his parents about a meeting with
Butterfield, "une aventure assez comique." Teilhard and his companion
naively recounted to Butterfield that Dawson had found iguanadon bones in
a quarry. It was one of Butterfield's dreams to have these for his museum.
"I grow wild," said Butterfield. Butterfield, angry at Dawson
(some of the anger popping off at Teilhard), decided to get even with this
so-called friend who would give coveted iguanadon fossils to the British
Museum rather than to the Hastings Museum, of which Dawson was himself a
member.

Butterfield then selected fossils from his collection, careful to extract
some of continental origin, and thus implicate Teilhard. Like a prestidigitator,
he did the fakery; he then looked about for an accomplice who would, under
the guise of helping Dawson, plant the fossils-Venus Hargreaves. Butterfield
pretended to advise Dawson on what to make of them and where to deliver
these fakes. A devilish curator, this Butterfield. A most disreputable navvie.
this Venus Hargreaves, "sans doute l'unique complice du genial mystificateur."
They planned a devastating supercherie.

Butterfield persuaded Dawson to search in the Piltdown neighborhood.
With the fifth columnist Hargreaves at his side, Dawson had no chance of
avoiding finding fossils. Butterfield continued to dissimulate friendship
as the fossils were exhumed and went so far, says van Esbroeck, as to counsel
Morris to exchange his flint for one of Dawson s fakes. The brief against
Dawson is made airtight by another incident, that of the decoy goose.

Teilhard breakfasted at Castle Lodge one morning in August 1913and
then went off with Dawson and Woodward to the pit. In his letter to his
parents, he added a pet goose to the list of diggers, the goose pestering
them and acting fierce toward passersby. While the diggers were distracted
by goose-antics, Venus Hargreaves surreptitiously dropped one of Butterfield's
fabrications onto a rain-washed refuse heap. Teilhard was poking about and
he found the canine of the jawbone of the famous man of Piltdown.

[119]

Workers at the pit with goose. Left to right: Teilhard [Ed. correction:
Robert Kennard, Jr.], Dawson, workman, ferocious goose, and Woodward. (From
archives of the British Museum [Natural History].)

Manwaring Baines had never met Butterfield, his predecessor as curator
of the Hastings Museum, but he had been advised that Butterfield was bizarre.
Butterfield had founded the Hastings and East Sussex Naturalist. He
had a history not quite clean: between 1892 and 1930, 542 of his identifications
of birds were rejected. Birdwatchers had been delighted by a flurry of rare
specimens over Sussex. Butterfield had imported rare specimens from overseas.
He and Dawson patched up their differences, and were reconciled, their British
pride preventing them from showing their rivalry to a stranger, particularly
to the alien Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin. Butterfield finally received what
he desired: when Dawson died, part of the fossil collection, or what remained
of the remains, went to the Hastings Museum.

Van Esbroeck, professor emeritus of the University of Gand, detests
his fellow Catholic and professional colleague, Father Teilhard. He is offended
at Teilhard's believing in the theory of evolution and censorious about
Teilhard's placing man as judge of God. Teilhard's philosophy he finds thoroughly
heretical. Teilhard was an apostate, not quite sane, "dans la lune,"
a theological troublemaker, though probably not quite bright enough to conceive
of such a hoax.

[120] Van Esbroeck's thesis has not been given the slightest attention
by other Piltdown scholars, which might mean that he hit on the truth about
Butterfield as the Piltdown hoaxer or that his Pleine Lumière
isitself an aventure assez comique. The only person
to pick up on his book was A. P. Chamberlain, who, perhaps flailing about
for some target other than his cousin Dawson, reminded Dawson's accusers
"of recent press articles on suspected ornithological frauds on the
Sussex coast about the same period."

If it were not for the prestige of the authorities I will now rely on,
I would not invite you to visit the next two suspects. However, Peter Costello,
a biographer of James Joyce and one of a handful of Piltdown scholars, and
Glyn Daniel, a world-famous archaeologist, editor of Antiquity, and
student of Piltdown for decades, cannot be disregarded in any inquest into
the Piltdown case. There is (at the time of this writing, June 1986) very
little upholding the incriminations posed by Costello and Daniel-in chronological
order, an article by Peter Costello in Antiquity (1985), a BBC program
(November 22, 1985) on that article, and another article in Antiquity
by Glyn Daniel (March 1986).

Lionel Woodhead, son of Samuel Allison Woodhead, wrote a letter (dated
in Costello's article as January 10, 1954) to Kenneth Oakley. In this, the
son says that Dawson brought the skull to analyst Woodhead; both returned
to the pit to look for other parts; "Dad himself found the eye tooth";
but Dad was not party to any hoax. A reply from Oakley elicited a further
comment (January 16, 1954): Sam Woodhead and Dawson found the jaw a few
days (not months) after Dawson had brought the skull. A day or so after
Sam Woodhead found the jaw, he found the tooth. A year later, Teilhard found
some other tooth.

In another letter (undated) to Glyn Daniel, Lionel said that his father
refused to talk about Piltdown. Mrs. Woodhead remembered that Dawson had
brought the bones in to find out how "one would treat bones to make
them appear older than they were and my father told him how it could be
done." Then Dawson "found" (the quotation marks are in Lionel
Woodhead's letter) bones and so did Sam Woodhead. He continues: "Unknown
to Dawson my father took some back to his lab where he became very suspicious.
Before he could ask Dawson what he was trying to do the 'find' had been
publicized. Unfortunately for what happened later my father was an extremely
loyal friend and did not give the secret away."

These letters by Lionel Woodhead, written to exculpate his father, pointed
Costello precisely to the opposite conclusion. According to Lionel Woodhead,
his father had known of fraudulence as early as 1911; but [121] Woodhead
continued to dig as late as October 1913. Since (a) he knew it was a hoax
and (b) he continued to help out, then (c) he was in on it. It could be
that he collaborated with Dawson, but Costello is firmly persuaded that
Dawson was innocent, hence (d) Samuel Allinson Woodhead was the Piltdown
hoaxer.

Lionel did not find that logic persuasive. On the BBC "Newsnight'
program of November 22, 1985, Lionel Woodhead and Peter Costello had a go
at it. Lionel said that Sam Woodhead accused Dawson of doing "something
funny" and "there was a terrible row." His father kept quiet
out of "misplaced loyalty."

Peter, however, returned to the point that if Sam Woodhead had continued
digging at the pit after knowing "something funny" was going on,
he was at least part of the funny business. Furthermore, Sam Woodhead used
potassium bichromate in his chemical analyses. That clinches it.

Why did Sam Woodhead do it? Because, Costello said on the program, as
a "devout Presbyterian," he hoped that exposure of the hoax would
destroy evolutionary theory. (Sam Woodhead died in 1943; Costello did not
discuss why Sam Woodhead had not revealed the hoax in the thirty years between
its initiation and his death.)

Lionel Woodhead countered that his father, as a public analyst, would
not fake anything. The narrator said that Samuel Allinson Woodhead was a
"model of Edwardian respectability."

Glyn Daniel, who had rejected every prior identification of a culprit,
approved of Costello's. In a heading to Costello's article, Daniel said
that Piltdown scholars had wondered whether they would "ever know the
truth. Now we think we do." In his own article on the subject, that
of March 1986, he offered up John Theodore Hewitt (1868-1954), professor
of chemistry at Queen Mary College in London, as a collaborator. Hewitt
had read a paper on the natural gas that Dawson discovered at Heathfield;
Sam Woodhead, like Hewitt a member of the council of the Society of Analysts,
analyzed that gas.

The day after the BBC interview was broadcast, a Mrs. Elizabeth Pryce
wrote to Daniel. She said that in 1952 she had been a neighbor of Professor
Hewitt in Hurst. At a Sunday luncheon, "he told my parents and me that
he and a friend had made the Piltdown Man as a joke." She didn't remember
who that friend was "or if in fact it is true." She and her mother
had discussed Professor Hewitt's confession. In another letter to Glyn Daniel,
she elaborated: she and her mother had "talked about the time when
Dr. Hewitt, as we knew him, spoke about the making of the skull. How he
laughed when he said, 'One day they will find out it was [122] made by man.'
My mum says she can close her eyes and see this."

Dr. Daniel went to visit Mrs. Pryce and her mum, Mrs. Hawkins, who remembered
clearly the conversation that had taken place with Dr. Hewitt 34 years before.
Daniel is impressed by the fact that in the entire field (he comes to a
total count of 21 suspects), Hewitt was the only one who said he did it-with
a friend who may have been Samuel Woodhead.

The case brought against Woodhead (I don't know whether Costello accepts
Hewitt as Woodhead's accomplice) is more reasonable than that brought against
Butterfield, and shorter. If the accusation hinges on Woodhead's having
access to potassium bichromate and his being a devout Presbyterian, it's
shaky. But final judgment awaits Costello's book.